


Sandstorm

by Starofwinter



Category: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types
Genre: Anger, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 12:10:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13166646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starofwinter/pseuds/Starofwinter
Summary: "The desert doesn't know you're here."  Rán thinks the Force doesn't know either.





	Sandstorm

One thing has stuck with Rán in her travels with the Rebellion, the words of an old trader from the very desert planet she’d ended up trapped on: “The desert doesn’t know you’re here.”

She’s never quite understood that so well as she does now.  She’s lost, deep in the desert, tucked under the pathetic shelter of a tiny cave as a sandstorm rages past.  She thinks of the lessons the Masters might have taught with it -  _ we are all only temporary visitors in the galaxy, the galaxy will continue to spin on whether we are here or not, the Force will do what it needs to do despite us. _  With the absence of every sound but the wind and sand outside, she can hear their voices clearly.  Her chest aches with it.  

Beneath the turmoil, though… she feels something else, a gentle nudge at her senses.  The Force is clearer here, and it’s trying to call her.  She can’t, though.  She  _ won’t _ .  Because what has the Force ever done for her?  All it’s ever done is stayed silent as the Sith grew and grew and the Jedi faded away.  How was that what the Force needed?  Had it ever noticed they were there at all?  For all the good the Jedi had done, had the Force, like the desert, never even known they existed?  The thought brings a sob to her throat as she thinks of everyone she’d ever known, their light snuffed out as surely as the suns are outside.  

_ It will pass _ , she thinks she hears a voice say, but she shuts that out too.  She closes her eyes tight and drops to her knees, screaming out in pure, grieving fury; all the anger and pain she’s felt for years, locked up tight, pours out of her at once.  It’s swallowed up by the howling wind outside, leaving her with ears ringing and with her chest hollowed out, her emotions absorbed by the desert storm that still doesn’t even know she’s there.

She thinks the Force is like that too.  For all that she tried to release her emotions into the Force… it never helped.  The anger, the frustration, the grief - it was all still there, just deadened somehow, like she  _ should _ feel better, but she can’t.  

There’s so much loss, so much pain, and does the Force ever acknowledge it?  It hasn’t.  It hasn’t reached back, it’s only ever just  _ been there _ , as it always has.  So she stopped reaching, and she doesn’t want to reach out again.  The Force can carry on without her.

* * *

The storm passes, and it leaves behind a landscape she barely recognizes.  Rán stumbles out, blinking in the bright light of the twin suns, and starts in the direction she desperately is the same way she was heading before the storm.  

She passes by a farm and pauses for a moment, watching the little blond boy as he plays with a starfighter under the watchful eye of an older man, with more gray hair than copper, and her heart twists for a moment until she feels the nudge of the Force again.  It annoys her out of her wistfulness, and she stubbornly pushes on.  

It’s hours before she reaches the spaceport, but she finally reaches her ship and escapes both the desert and the tug of the Force, washing off both sand and memories in the tiny onboard ‘fresher.

* * *

Fifteen years later, she meets the same blond boy, now a young man with the same bright smile and the Force blazing around him like a star.  He wields a lightsaber that’s so familiar it makes her heart stop for a moment, and he says it’s his father’s, given to him by Obi-Wan Kenobi.

When she reaches out to the Force for the first time in twenty years, it notices her, and it reaches back with the familiar voice and face of her Master.


End file.
